“You have,” he replied dreamily. “Off the island, and all the way back to that snug apartment with the new colour scheme, and we’re sitting together over our Sunday night bowls of bread and milk, with the gate-legged table between us....”
She lowered her eyes and slipped him one of her hands. So one sees that the songbirds, when it came to that, would really be not unjustified in their decision!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AT DAWN IN THE CHINA SEA
I
His small son had really begun to usurp his entire horizon. Jerome was about the proudest father ever seen. But the estrangement of Jerome and Lili came to be a more or less openly recognized fact—which added a sombre note.
Lili went about beaming in just the old, untroubled way. Except when the baby was at her breast, one would never dream of associating her with the supreme experience of motherhood. Whatever might happen to her—and so much, in her short life, had happened already—Lili would never be any different.
With Jerome, however, the case stood otherwise. He seemed slowly pulling ahead; but those great facts of life, which made on him so enormous an impression, appealed to Lili rather as episodes—objects to arrest a moment as one flitted along through the vast lark of living.
As for the baby, it seemed to have fallen down very badly indeed in the role of mediator; instead of feeling himself drawn back to Lili again, Jerome appeared to have transferred bodily all the love he had once known for her over to the little new life that bore his name. How strangely things moved! He tried to understand it, and felt that he really understood so little.